June 3

Baseball and pulp fiction, now there's a combination. Keep your eye on the ball:

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/06/p-is-for-pulp-52.html

Hendrik Hertzberg is knocked out by Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's undergraduate thesis at Princeton, where she was Class of 1981:

“To The Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933” would be an impressive enough piece of work if its author had been, say, a thirtyish assistant professor publishing in an academic history journal. Coming from a twenty-year-old college kid, it’s a truly remarkable accomplishment, quite out of the ordinary. Either that, or the college thesis-writing standards of the early nineteen-eighties were dramatically higher than I had assumed. “To The Final Conflict” is a doorstopper of a college paper—a hundred and thirty double-spaced typewritten pages, exclusive of footnotes (unfortunately not included in the pdf facsimile). That’s around twenty thousand well-chosen words, written in a straightforward, deceptively simple style, with scarcely an infelicitous sentence or a detour into academic jargon from beginning to end.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/06/elena-kagans-not-so-final-conflict.html

It sounds a damn sight better than my Yale senior thesis, dated just one year before (I was Class of 1980). My 80-page essay, as I mentioned here on January 6, was on the underrated novelist Wright Morris; and although I'm proud of the heavy reading I did to take the measure of the prolific Morris, I never quite came up with the right structure for my material, and there are plenty of infelicitous sentences in the final result.

The popular Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafon made a list of 20th century Gothic novels that is a nice mix of literary (Faulkner), pulp (James M. Cain), popular (Stephen King), and cultish (Mervyn Peake). I should put scare quotes around those descriptors, of course; it's all just good writing. I like that Ruiz Zafon is a fan of the often unfairly denigrated Joyce Carol Oates:

I've long considered Oates to be one of the greatest living authors, and certainly the undisputed queen of gothic literary fiction. This book is part of her grand Victorian cycle which begins with Bellefleur. Mysteries of Winterthurn is one of the least-known works in her vast oeuvre but it's my personal favourite. Oates is an extremely prolific writer who has been able to sustain an extraordinary level of quality in her output. Life is short, so kill your TV now and start exploring her universe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jun/02/carlos-ruiz-zafon-gothic-novels

RIP: Randolph Stow. Stephen Romei at A Pair of Ragged Claws pays tribute to the Australian novelist:

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/alr/index.php/theaustralian/comments/randolph_stow_australia_loses_one_of_its_greatest_writers/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Stow

Elsewhere in the antipodes: Are there North American moose roaming the hills of New Zealand? Well, there indisputably were some moose released there in 1910, but their ongoing presence has not been confirmed since 1952. New excitement has arisen over a photograph taken from a trailcam that just might be a young moose:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/fiordland-pic/

The commenters at the Cryptomundo post are judicious, pretty much agreeing on that useful Scottish verdict, "Not proven." I'm tempted to order a copy of Ken Tustin's book A (Nearly) Complete History of the Moose in New Zealand.

Right in time for my arrival in Korea, a new English-language history of Korean film (and a new documentary on the subject as well):

http://www.theoneonefour.com/2010/06/04/in-review-korean-film-history-written-and-filmed/

Will Friedwald marvels at the musical adventures of Scott Robinson:

There's no one else doing anything close to what Mr. Robinson is doing: playing every style that exists in the jazz world (and classical, pop and world music besides), on almost every horn known to man (reeds, brass) and even some rhythm instruments.... [He stores his working instruments in] a converted garage behind his house....The centerpiece of his collection is the contrabass saxophone, one of only 16 or so believed to exist, a seven-foot monster of a horn. Mr. Robinson discovered it in a secondhand-furniture store in Rome about 15 years ago, and it took more than two years to convince the owner to part with it. It was worth the effort: The contra produces a beautiful roar that might be likened to the love dance of a pair of happy hippopotami but is like nothing else in the human world.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2010/05/25/127117581/my-what-a-large-instrument-you-have?ft=1&f=104014555

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909804575123893405940402.html

Among notables born on this date are poets Allen Ginsberg and Detlev von Liliencron (Germany), novelist Larry McMurtry, fantasy novelist Marion Zimmer Bradley, painters Raoul Dufy (France) and Mikhail Larionov (Russia), dancer Josephine Baker, film directors Ted Tetzlaff and Alain Resnais, film historian Paul Rotha, minor league baseball legend Steve Dalkowski, jazz singer Dakota Staton, singer/songwriter Curtis Mayfield, game show host Chuck Barris, broadcaster Anderson Cooper, and actors Maurice Evans, Paulette Goddard, Ellen Corby, Tony Curtis, and Colleen Dewhurst. No less than Andy Kaufman's projects, or the obscure-beyond-New Jersey presence of Uncle Floyd, Chuck Barris's The Gong Show is postmodern television before anyone really knew what that was. It is serious in its very scuzziness, and funny as all heck once you get the vibe. In our hyped-up era of American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, Barris's take-down of "entertainment" and "talent" is still brutally suggestive. No moment on The Gong Show ever topped the appearance of the Popsicle Twins in 1978, which only aired on the East Coast because NBC standards and practices pulled the clip before its re-airing on the West Coast that night: